VI: May 12, 1864

VI

MAY 12, 1864

I

LOUISE AND SALLY SPRAGUE HAD RETURNED TO RICHMOND with Sedgwick when he got his exchange, about, the time that Cabot was sent north from Libby Prison. Ransom’s youngest boy, Barry, came with them too, as he was soon to enter the Military Institute at Lexington which his brother, Fauquier, was leaving, like many of the upper classmen, for active service in the field. Fauquier was going into the horse artillery, where Eden’s faithful childhood beau, Grafton Crabby was now a captain.

There had been recriminations, transfers, and disillusion in the Confederate command during the summer lull around Richmond when McClellan was beaten back to Harrison’s Landing. Lee stood higher than he had ever done, as the saviour of Richmond, and was known affectionately to all the army as Marse Robert. Stonewall Jackson was barely second to him. But Magruder, for one, was under a cloud after Malvern Hill, and when he departed to a western command his force was split among several other officers. Dabney was in Pickett’s division, which was given to Longstreet, and Longstreet was soon ordered up to Gordonsville to work with Jackson, who was already there. Stuart, too, was in the field around Gordonsville, and Sedgwick went off at once in high spirits to rejoin him.

Distracted with nursing her mother besides the wounded, Eden was thankful for Louise’s gentle, tireless presence, and Sally’s rather heartless natural gaiety was in a way a welcome relief from tension and despair.

Felicity was still very ill when the time came for Ransom to leave Richmond with Lee, but she seemed a little better and Ransom knew that he could not burden his harassed commander at such a time with a plea for personal consideration. He had not been gone twenty-four hours when Felicity died, serenely and beautifully, as became her, in her sleep.

They buried her in Hollywood Cemetery where the dead soldiers went, with only women and fifteen-year-old Barry to mourn her at the graveside,

where the roar of the rapids in the river below was loud beneath the arching trees. And no one had much time to grieve because the wounded from Manassas and Chantilly arrived by the trainload and there was more work than ever before. They decided not to return home to Williamsburg after they had seen Barry off to Lexington. Eden could have been in touch with Cabot there, but they would have been cut off entirely from their men at the front, for Williamsburg was still a Federal garrison, its only communication with Richmond and the Confederate army by the underground mail and smuggling routes. Besides, every woman able to do nursing was needed in Richmond. And then, just as they began to wonder about going home for Gran’s birthday, the battle at Sharpsburg brought another piteous harvest of casualties.

So for the first time in anybody’s memory Gran’s birthday was not festive, and there was no reception, no new dress, and no one to carry her downstairs. Sue and Myrta made gifts, and there was even a white cake to cut, and three generations of Williamsburg women came to pay their respects and bring their love—but it couldn’t be called a party.

Lee was beaten at Sharpsburg and forced into retreat, his invasion of the North at a disastrous end. He won the next battle, at Marye’s Heights near Fredericksburg just before Christmas. Although Eden had already called on the Provost-Marshal to request passes to Williamsburg, they postponed the journey again in order to help with the new wounded which flooded into the Crabb mansion in Franklin Street. They were all living there since the men of the family had gone from the Spotswood—Louise and Sally shared a bedroom, but Felicity’s death left Eden alone in hers and there was some talk of sending for Sue to make herself useful after Christmas.

Cabot’s present to Gran arrived promptly, brought by a smiling orderly from the commandant’s office at the College. He sent her a pound of the best tea money could buy, and in a quaint purple velvet box a pair of Regency ear-rings, delicate scrolls set with small yellow diamonds. She put them on with fingers that trembled with eagerness, and wore them like a peacock even when there was no one to see. There was no limit to her love of extravagances like that, and she had to be ninety-five before anyone discovered it and indulged her.

For Eden he sent lengths of sapphire blue velvet to make a gown, worth a small fortune at blockade prices, with calico at nearly two dollars a yard.

There was no way to forward it safely through the lines to Richmond, so Gran enclosed a snippet in a letter by the underground mail, which functioned smoothly now despite the efforts of the provost guard.

Since McClellan’s army had departed from Harrison’s Landing in August, Williamsburg was the nearest point to Richmond which the Federal troops held, and it had acquired an unhappy importance as a terminal and outpost. The telegraph connected Fort Magruder with Washington. The press and the Army were established at Fortress Monroe. Confederate detachments from up Richmond way raided Williamsburg one day and Federal troops used it as a starting point for reconnaissance in force the next. Spies of both sides came and went. Smuggling of drugs and luxuries went on in the rivers under the noses of the provost guard, and provoked innumerable small alarums and excursions, usually at night. Gran said it was worse than Cornwallis, for at least he hadn’t gone on so long.

The northward and westward doors and windows of the College were bricked up against the Confederate raids, with portholes for small arms.

Deep trenches were dug extending from the College buildings in either direction well beyond the Richmond and Jamestown roads, trenches in which ten-foot logs were set vertically three feet in the ground, as a barrier against Confederate cavalry. Back of the College, from road to road stretched a long curving abatis of oak and beech trees with sharpened limbs standing westward and all entangled with wire. The campus itself was covered with the huts of the provost guard where once the white tents of the Fifteenth Virginia Infantry had stood in the early days of the war, and the guard patrolled the streets and preserved martial law. Civil courts were suspended. The Federal soldiers used the bricks from the ruined Palace and Capitol to build foundations for their huts, and burned whatever woodwork they could find as firewood, even at the College.

The regiment in occupation was the Fifth Pennsylvania, composed largely of Philadelphia roughs, and Major Cronin ruled them and the civilians alike with an iron hand. Except when his men got a drinking bout going, or a Confederate raid came down, or a smuggler-hunt was on, something akin to order usually prevailed and the streets were safe for the inhabitants, mostly women, who were left in the town.

It was a grim Christmas—in Williamsburg, in Richmond, and in the bleak shelters the army had thrown up around Fredericksburg; grimmest of

all at Washington where twelve thousand wounded lay, the dreadful result of Burnside’s useless and costly assaults at Marye’s Heights, nearly two and a half times the Confederate losses in the same action.

Cabot had sent Sue’s manuscripts north with his copy before he was taken prisoner at Gaines’ Mill, and three of them were published during the winter, and paid for by bank drafts, which Cronin’s adjutant obligingly cashed for her to a total sum which seemed to her staggeringly large. Early in the year a letter came for her from Trenton, New Jersey. She read it with astonishment and rushed upstairs to share it with Gran.

Dear Sue—[Melicent had written]

Cabot says I may write to you and say how much I have enjoyed reading your stories in Harper’s and the Lady’s Magazine. Of course I am used to his having things printed, but it seems to me very exciting that a girl can sell things too, and he says you aren’t much older than I am.’ I wonder how it feels to have money that you have earned!

All I can do is sing, and I have never had a chance to thank your sister Eden for the music she sent me. I learned all the songs and sang some of them in Washington when I was there, but I had to come back home and didn’t get to have lessons with Boldini after all, and it nearly broke my heart.

I sat to a photographer for Cabot’s Christmas present, wearing the dress I wore when I sang at the reception at the Senator’s house. It’s pink. Cabot says I should send a copy of the photograph to you in this letter so you will know what I am like in case you want to answer. It is a lovely dress, but the picture makes me look as though my teeth stuck out, and they don’t really, at least I never thought they did. Cabot says if you do write an answer and give it to the adjutant he will send it on to me, but you must leave it open so it can be read and they will know we are not passing military secrets or using a cypher. As though we would know any! [So much for that night in Washington, still a horror to her dreams, when Cabot came home in the wet waterproof and butter-nut suit and found her drowsing over The Cloister and the Hearth. ]

I hope when the war is over and Cabot comes down to marry Eden we can meet and really know each other. Perhaps you would let me see one of your stories then, before it is printed, I think it would be very

exciting to read it in your own handwriting instead of in type. As you can see, I can’t even write a letter very well!

Yours very sincerely,

MELICENT MURRAY.

Sue was delighted, and sat down to answer the letter at once, with the photograph propped up on the desk before her. It was, indeed, a lovely dress, and Melicent’s childish pride of it was to Sue at eighteen rather touching. Sue had had so many pretty clothes, she had never thought much about them, and now, when it was getting hard to find enough food to eat, clothes mattered to her even less than ever before. All the girls in the family had had well-stocked wardrobes when the war strated and were not yet going shabby like so many Southern women who had not had enough dresses to begin with. It was more important to Sue that Melicent’s hair looked brushed and shining, and her smile, which parted her lips over small, even teeth, was both shy and radiant. She decided that Melicent was a darling, and longed for the day when she could be added on to the family as another sister.

Dear Melicent—[Sue wrote]

I was so glad to get your letter, and the picture, which I have shown to Gran, and we are both agreed that we could not do better than to acquire you at once as a member of the family.

The war goes on and on, and Eden is still in Richmond nursing the wounded. There has been no way to let your brother know that our mother died last August in Richmond. She was ill when he left the prison. It was some sort of fever she got from the wounded, and the doctors could not get the medicines they thought she needed.

I wouldn’t mind the blockade shutting out silks and tea and luxuries, I wouldn’t even mind food being so scarce and dear, if only they would let the drugs come through. It isn’t going to make our army give up because the men have to bear their wounds without morphine, and even have amputations without chloroform. And now Eden writes that she will always be haunted by the feeling that if they could have got digitalis and opium for mother she might have lived. We always pray that the smugglers won’t get caught whenever we have a hunt on here, and I

would tell the adjutant so to his face—because there is always the chance that they are carrying drugs that will save lives among the sick and wounded. Of course there is a similar chance that they are only smuggling tea or sugar or fripperies, and in that case it doesn’t matter, because they are wasting their time!

I hope your brother is well of his wound, and please tell him that when we last heard from Eden she was all right. It seems a lifetime since I’ve seen her here, but each time she thinks of coming home there is another battle and more wounded arrive. She is working at a private hospital which has been established in the Crabbs’ house on Franklin Street. They can take about twenty men there, and the beds are always full. Mrs. Crabb has broken down and it takes a good deal of Charlotte’s time to look after her, so that Eden and Sally and Aunt Louise are trying to do all the nursing of the men. We hear nothing from the front, and I suppose I couldn’t tell you if we did. All I know is that Father and Uncle Lafe and the boys all must have charmed lives, as they have been in nearly every action so far, and come through safely.

I thought for a while I would go to Richmond myself to do nursing, but it seems best for one of us to be here with Gran—though I must say she is always the calmest of us all when there is a raid! She asks me to give you her love, and tell you to be sure and write again soon and send news of your brother.

Thank you again for liking my stories, and believe me, most affectionately,

Your sister-to-be,

SUSANNAH DAY.

II

But Fredericksburg was another barren victory for the South, and Burnside had been able to withdraw his punished army across the Rappahannock. Refugees from the ruined town poured into Richmond along with the wounded and prisoners, bringing terrible stories of the bombardment which had demolished houses and left the old and the sick and the children without shelter in bitter weather. Smallpox came with them too, and there was much talk of spies again, and another sentence of

hanging. “Fighting Joe” Hooker superseded Burnside, and Yankee cavalry raids came to the very outskirts of Richmond as the severest winter in years gave way to the spring of 1863.

In February Dabney passed through Richmond with Pickett in the army Longstreet was taking south to forage in the richly provisioned country round Suffolk, which was held by the Federals. Dabney had only a few snatched minutes to spend with Eden in Franklin Street—the first time they had met since Felicity’s death, though Ransom had managed to accompany Lee last November on one of his brief visits to the Richmond headquarters.

In the small upstairs parlour the Crabbs had kept for a sitting-room when all the ground floor was given over to the rows of cots full of wounded, brother and sister held to each other while the tramp of marching feet never ceased outside. There was little comfort between them except the warm family contact each stood in need of—their mother’s death had been peaceful, but there was no saying she had not suffered—Ransom’s hair, they both knew, had greyed, and his youthful carriage was gone forever—

the winter was a hard one, both for the troops around Lee’s headquarters near Fredericksburg and for the women in Richmond where food and fuel were scarce at any price—Dabney’s uniform was worn and muddy, his freshly shaven face was haggard—Eden in her working dress was frankly shabby under the clean white apron, and her soft mouth had tightened at the corners, beneath shadowed, heavy eyes.

They held to each other with tears, exchanging their news—Ransom had sent her his love from Fredericksburg—Sedgwick was well, and utterly devoted to General Stuart, and seemed to have made a life out of soldiering

—Pickett was a hero to his men, and Dabney was proud to be one of his captains—the latest word from Williamsburg was that Gran and the family there had kept their hearts high, and the Federal occupation, though inconvenient, was bearable—one could bear anything, it seemed…. They clung, cheek to cheek, and then he went down to say goodbye to Charlotte and Louise and Sally in the lower hall and was gone into the relentless tramp of marching feet as the regiments poured through the streets southward.

Jackson was the idol of the Confederacy now. “My troops sometimes fail in driving the enemy from a position, but the enemy always fail to drive my men from a position,” he said in his dour way, and no one called it

boasting. Hooker failed at Chancellorsville in May, but Jackson was wounded there, shot by his own pickets in the dusk by mistake.

The Confederacy was stunned. Even Lee, usually resigned to the will of the Lord, had rebelled during the dreadful week while the beloved life hung in the balance. “Jackson cannot die!” he said more than once. “Surely God will not take him from us, we need him so much.” But the miracle was not performed. After days of agony, during which his delirium was all of battle and his delusion was always of attack—(“Push up the columns,” he would plead with an imaginary staff. “Hasten up the columns—push the cannon forward—”)—Jackson came at last to some mirage of green pastures. “Let us pass over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees,” he murmured just before he died.

And so the Dead March was heard again in the streets of Richmond, this time for Stonewall Jackson. Everyone wept from the time the signal gun was fired and the distant band began to play the procession towards the Capitol where he was to lie in state. Eden stood with Louise and Sally in the bareheaded crowd that lined Main Street to see him pass, their cheeks wet with tears.

Pickett’s men had come north again just too late for Chancellorsville—

they led the way down Main Street at the slow step, a ragged, miscellaneously clad escort of mourning men, their arms reversed, their shot-torn banners furled and shrouded in crape; the Fayette Artillery came next, their battered, dented gun carriages painstakingly cleaned and polished; and then some cavalry, the gaunt horses groomed within an inch of their lives and still carrying themselves like the thoroughbreds most of them were; then the hearse with its dark plumes and the flower-covered Confederate flag which draped the coffin; the led war-horse followed its dead master, the boots across the saddle; the Staff came behind it with, bowed heads, the President and his Cabinet, the officers who could be spared from the field, the Mayor and Council of Richmond, and the mile-long stream of private carriages to do him homage; all moving mutely and patiently in the sweltering heat to the deep throb of the majestic music.

There was no one to replace him, but his command was divided up and Lee drove north again in June with Longstreet and Stuart and A. P. Hill—

leaving Harvey Hill in charge of the Richmond defences, so that Lafe, as a member of Hill’s military family, was with Louise again, and Sally moved

into Eden’s room. Once more Lee passed his army across the Potomac into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Harrisburg was threatened, and even Philadelphia. Lincoln called for another hundred thousand men.

A year ago the South had stood as near to victory as now, and Lee fell back to Sharpsburg and defeat. This time they promised themselves it would be different. This time the supply lines would hold, this time the ragged regiments in grey would have just that last extra ounce of strength that was needed to end the war. This time Lee would not have to retreat into Virginia and begin all over again….

This time they fought at a little place in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.

Three days they fought in the dust and the heat. And after three days it was plain that Lee was beaten, with terrible losses. He got away, though, across the Potomac, from under Meade’s very nose, and took his army with him.

The news came slowly to the anxious, excited crowds outside the War Department in Richmond. The first reports were of a Confederate victory—

everyone had been so hopeful, so sure it would be a victory. Then they heard that Lee had recrossed the Potomac, southward. Gradually the disaster grew—Hill had gone in too soon—Stuart had arrived too late—

Cemetery Ridge—Pickett’s charge—where were the guns which should have covered Pickett?—Pickett was annihilated—a whole division wiped out—where were the guns….

The next day, while Richmond was still reeling, they learned that Vicksburg had fallen—and Charleston was under siege now—but Lee was safe at Culpeper again, and Meade was not crowding him. By the middle of July Richmond rallied groggily in the stupefying heat A message had come through for Eden from Ransom: Still here, even Dabney. A scant fifteen hundred men had come back from that charge with Pickett, but Dabney was among them. Charlotte threw herself into Eden’s arms and cried till she got hiccups. She hadn’t shed a tear while they thought Dabney was dead.

During August Lee came down to Richmond for a fortnight. His beard was nearly white. Ransom, who accompanied him, said that Lee had offered his resignation after Gettysburg, but Davis wouldn’t hear of it; and Ransom said Lee wanted to uncover Richmond and march direct on Washington, at the-risk of exchanging capitals, but Davis wouldn’t have that either.

Dabney turned up again in Richmond in the middle of September. What was left of Pickett’s division was being sent down to Petersburg because of new Federal activity on the Peninsula, and Pickett was going to be married, of all things, said Dabney. Charlotte at once begged him for details.

“She’s only a schoolgirl,” Dabney told them, sitting in his shirtsleeves in the little upstairs parlour in Franklin Street while Eden tried to mend his coat to respectability. “He’s been waiting for her to grow up, apparently.

But Gettysburg jolted him. He’s got scared to death if he doesn’t get her now he may never have another chance.”

“And quite right, too,” said Eden, and her brother cocked an eyebrow in her direction.

“But hard on the girl,” he remarked.

“Not at all—if she loves him.”

“She is supposed to have fallen in love with him at the age of ten, or thereabouts, the story goes.”

“You sound as though you don’t quite believe it,” she accused.

“It seems just a leetle bit tall for a story,” he said, grinning. “He’s a spectacular sort of devil, mind! Long, wavy hair—hands and feet small as a woman’s, almost—cuts a dash, you know, can’t help it! Romantic soldiers are the softest fellers there are, too. He’s in a mush about this girl—has been for years, even while he was fighting the Injuns out West. So now he jerks her out of school to marry him. Well, I look at it another way. Suppose he gets the heart shot right out of him—I’ve seen it happen. She’s a widow in her teens. Suppose he loses a leg, or worse—it happens any day. She’s saddled with a cripple all her life.” Dabney shook his handsome head judicially. “Mm-mm—I couldn’t do it. It’s cruel.”

“But she’s got a right to him!” cried Charlotte. “She’s got a right to him now, while he’s whole! Especially if she’s been in love with him all her life!” And then she got very pink as Dabney’s slow, surprised gaze came to rest on her.

“Well, well,” he drawled, and glanced at Eden mirthfully, and back again to Charlotte, who was sitting very straight with her knitting, her cheeks on fire. “Look who’s got opinions about love!” Dabney marvelled in his gentle voice, and there was laughter in it, but no derision.

“Any girl has a right to whatever happiness she can snatch these days,”

Eden reminded him quietly, and—

“Where’s Cabot?” he asked at once, with a penetrating look.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the underground for? Hasn’t he sent you any word?”

“Only through Williamsburg. His sister writes to Sue and we send messages that way. She saw him not long ago—he’s better of his wound, and—sent his love and his sympathy about Mother.” Eden bit off the thread and handed the grey coat back to him. “There, that’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. Now it’s time for me to relieve Aunt Louise downstairs. Come and say good night before you go.”

She glanced back as she left the room. Dabney’s lazy pose had not altered. Charlotte sat erect with scarlet cheeks, knitting very fast. Eden closed the door on them softly, knowing that Charlotte’s mother would not have approved.

It was a wonderful wedding Pickett and his Sally Corbell had at St.

Paul’s in Petersburg on the fifteenth, and there was a big reception for them in Richmond that evening. Mrs. Davis herself gave the cake, though sweets were almost unobtainable, and the plantation servants from Pickett’s home near Malvern Hill sent dozens of sora which they had killed for the wedding-feast by going out at night with wooden paddles, as there was no ammunition—and gallons of terrapin stew. Little bags of sugar and salt and tea were given as wedding presents. More than a thousand soldier guests came in uniform from the army stationed roundabout Richmond, the President and his Cabinet being almost the only men in civilian clothes. The women wore refurbished and carefully preserved finery, and the dancing went on till dawn, almost as though no war was being fought.

Dabney escorted Eden proudly to the reception and presented her to his general and the blissful little bride who stood beside him to receive their guests. Slight as a boy, with long dark hair and brilliant grey eyes, the hero of Gettysburg bent above Eden’s hand. “Your sister?” he said, smiling. “I am honoured, ma’am. But what about a wife, my boy?” “You sound like the fox who lost his tail, sir,” said Dabney, and Sally Pickett’s laughter could be heard above the waltz music.

“Yes, Dabney, what about a wife?” Eden asked him while they danced, and he glanced down at her with his lazy, charming smile.

“‘When this cruel war is over’—maybe,” he said.

“It’s cruel, all right—when she’s so willing.”

“Who’s willing?”

“Don’t be dense, Dabney. Poor Charl goes every colour of the rainbow every time you look at her!”

“What, little Charlotte?” He seemed genuinely surprised, but pleased.

“She’s even younger than Pickett’s bride!”

“Well, you’re younger than Pickett, too.”

“Now, wait a minute, Dee, don’t rush me. Besides, I’ve got a war on.”

“Pickett found time.”

“She talks so much, Dee!”

“Mostly when she’s nervous. That makes her worse.”

“Then she’s always nervous when I’m around!”

“Naturally.”

Dabney snickered shamelessly.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “Charl always makes me laugh.”

“Not a bad thing in a wife, I should think. Especially these days.”

“She’s like a puppy,” said Dabney, but with affection in his voice. “Or like kittens, with blue eyes and funny little necks. Or colts. Sort of pathetic, but comic at the same time. I don’t think I’d have the heart to marry Charl.

She might grow up if she got married, and then she wouldn’t be Charl any more.”

“You wouldn’t want her to be an old maid, either, would you?”

“Can’t imagine it,” he said firmly. “Can’t risk some clumsy lummox making her miserable, though, I never thought of that.”

“I know one clumsy lummox who is making her very miserable right now,” said Eden. “And that’s you!”

“No! ” said Dabney, pleased, but with a lingering scepticism. “I’m just somebody she’s known all her life.”

“Well, even so, she thinks you’re wonderful. Sometimes I find it rather a strain not to set her right on it, but so far I have managed to hold my tongue!”

“Charl thinks I’m wonderful,” he said, as though digesting a brand new idea, and then he snickered again. “She does make me laugh,” he said.

The music paused, and Eden was claimed by a new partner. When the ball broke up at last, the guests departed under the morning star. Dabney was sleepy, and kept very silent on the way home. Eden hoped he was thinking, but suspected the punch.

III

Dabney was right when he told Eden that Sedgwick had made a life out of cavalry service.

War was to Sedgwick a form of peace—a hard respite from the ordeal of learning not to think of Sue. You had no time to be in love, you had no time to mourn your future, while you were fighting a war. Cavalry forced you to live each day, each hour as it came. Cavalry taught you that the thing you dreaded most might never have time to happen to you. Cavalry took all you had to give and demanded more, until your tired body slept every chance it got and there was no room left in your cosmos for repining. If you were a good cavalryman you couldn’t remember ever having been anything else, and you never looked even a week ahead of today because it was likely that nothing would matter to you at all a week hence. So Sedgwick throve and distinguished himself in a life which, before that day on the riverbank at Jamestown, would have been no good to him—a life which was just a little bit harder than sitting still and doing without Sue would have been. And then there was the general.

Like Jackson, whose routes had always been littered with sick or exhausted men who could not keep up, Stuart wore out his horses and wore out his troopers, always cheerful himself and always ready for a fight. It was said that he considered his military problems too serious to be treated seriously—the odds against him were too heavy to contemplate, and so he led his squadrons into battle as to a fox-hunt, hallooing joyously towards the kill.

He seldom set up headquarters, but lived in constant, shifting contact with the enemy, which was his idea of cavalry’s proper place. He could ride for fifty hours at a stretch, till the wretched troopers behind him fell asleep in their saddles and the horses stumbled and knocked against each other in the ranks. He never made allowance for man or beast, and removed an officer he considered not sufficiently courageous. He never said “Go” but always said “Come on, boys!”

He was married, and devoted to his Flora, and wrote her frequently from the saddle, beginning My dear Darling. But the girls who lived in the country between the armies danced and rode with the grey-coated general and repeated to him all they had gleaned from some unwary blue-clad

admirer a few days before. It was no uncommon thing for him to take a delighted rebel miss with him along the picket lines on inspection, detailing an embarrassed trooper to entertain her while he himself transacted military business with the outpost commander, gave his instructions, received reports, collected his lady and rode on.

The legends which grew up around him were no taller than the facts.

You could not improve on General Stuart. He said that picking an aide was like taking a wife, it was for better or for worse. He made a clever girl named Antonia his honorary aide-de-camp in a formal written document signed with an impression of his signet ring. He risked himself constantly in little affairs of the videttes like any common trooper. He wore a red rose in his jacket in season, and a red love-knot of ribbon when there were no roses. His wide, soft, fawn-coloured hat was looped up on the right side with a gold star and a curling ostrich plume. He loved charades and practical jokes, and wrote bad poetry, and chaffed even the solemn Jackson.

Raiding near Alexandria once, he telegraphed the Washington Government over his own signature that if they could not send larger supply trains up to Burnside it was not worth his, Stuart’s, while to intercept them. This went so well as a joke that he soon sent another telegram to Washington complaining that the mules he had just captured from their General Meigs were very inferior and please to send better ones next time. On the retreat southward after Sharpsburg his irrepressible troopers swam their tired, gaunt horses across the swollen fords of the Potomac singing Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny….

Those were all true stories. Better ones were not invented. This was the man Sedgwick loved like a brother and revered as a commander.

After Gettysburg the Confederate Army lay around Culpeper where good grazing was, while men and horses recuperated and the sick and injured rejoined. By September Meade was jabbing at them again with his Yankee cavalry and Stuart fought back briskly—at Brandy Station, where things went so badly for him that two grey horse-batteries fought back to back on the same knoll, holding off blue troops on either hand; at Auburn, where for a whole night Stuart and two brigades lay on their arms within sight of the Federal camp-fires, almost surrounded and facing certain capture, and got away in the dawn with another good story to tell; at Buckland Mills, where he captured Custer’s wagons and personal baggage;

and so on through the winter months, while the minstrel Sweeny died of pneumonia and Flora Stuart had a baby daughter.

Furloughs were hard to come by that winter, but Fauquier and Grafton Crabb got off both at the same time for five full days in Richmond, and were made much of there. The night they returned, Sedgwick went over to their camp to hear about it and found Grafton very low in his mind.

Fauquier was outspoken.

“Eden is still playing the fool about that Yankee,” he said disgustedly.

Sedgwick grinned at Grafton, who lay on one elbow staring into the fire.

“Turned you down again?” he suggested with sympathy.

“Oh, I ought to be used to that by now! Only—if it was some fellow on our side she had in mind, it would be easier to swallow. But you liked him, didn’t you?”

“We all liked him,” admitted Sedgwick. “Especially Gran.”

“What’s he like, anyway? Or maybe I should say—what’s wrong with me?”

“Well, it’s hard to say.” Sedgwick threw another log on the fire, for the night was frosty and their scanty rations and threadbare uniforms gave them no bodily weapons against the cold. “She’s used to you, that’s one trouble.”

“I know! Like Dabney with Charl.”

“What? ” said Sedgwick, and his eyes widened.

“Played together—grew up together—Dabney thinks Charl is still a yearling. But ever since he came home from England she’s been eating her heart out for him. Don’t ever let on I told you, she’d skin me sure enough!”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” murmured Sedgwick, more pleased than not, as he thought it over. Charlotte was pretty cute. “Well, why not?”

“Sure, why not?” Grafton repeated irritably. “Why not Eden and me?

The Crabb family just doesn’t seem to have much luck with the Days!”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Fauquier said soothingly. “After all, Dabney’s pretty busy just now.”

“It’s now or never,” muttered Grafton, throwing pebbles at the fire.

In the spring of 1864 the army was back at Orange and the man named Grant was in possession of Culpeper. He commanded the Federal Army now, ranking Meade. And in May Grant began to move. He moved westward towards the old battlefield of Chancellorsville. He was going to

try again, where Meade had failed the year before, through the Wilderness to Richmond.

The battle began on the fourth of May—before Grant expected it to. Lee chose to fight there in the tangled woods among the dogwood and flowering almond, with violets underfoot, and grape hyacinth, and the quail piping their astonishment on every side. The dense undergrowth helped him to conceal how he was outnumbered. It also made his cavalry fight dismounted, which never amused them much.

There were a few small clearings, but no room for cavalry charges and artillery firing into the thickets where the infantry fighting soon became desperate could do as much damage to friend as enemy, so the big guns were silent and useless. In the maze of stunted pine and scrub oak, the hand-to-hand combat raged all afternoon. The growth was so thick that the officers could not see the length of their own commands, with little idea whether the men in the next brigade were driving or being driven except by the sound of their musketry. As darkness came on, the position of the opposing lines was revealed only by the flash of their guns and the deep-chested Yankee cheer answering the shrill Confederate yell, and the crash of the companies through the brush.

For two days they fought each other to a standstill there in the Wilderness, with no gain on either side, while the underbrush and even the hasty log breastworks caught fire, often separating the lines by a wall of smoke and flame through which the helpless wounded cried out in extremis, and those who could move came crawling with burns more serious than the wounds which had disabled them.

During those two days Ransom at his post in Lee’s near vicinity twice saw men from the ranks lay hold of the general’s bridle and turn him back from the advanced front line, while the anxious cry, “Lee to the rear!

General Lee to the rear or we won’t go on!” ran along the files. And Lee would then sit stationary on the big grey horse Traveller, smiling grimly at their excessive solicitude for his life, the men who themselves moved forward fearlessly into the inferno. Sometimes they touched his stirrup or his knee or Traveller’s shoulder as though for luck on their way in; sometimes they cheered him as they went; one man swept off his hat in silent tribute at sight of his commander and Lee returned the salute with grave courtesy and the man went on at a trot into the rain of bullets, his face

aglow. Ransom was at Lee’s side when a dishevelled, breathless courier galloped in with a message, and as he took the paper Lee ran a sympathetic eye over the young man’s winded horse. “Dismount, and rest that horse,” he said, and reached into Traveller’s saddle-bag for a biscuit, which he fed the weary animal.

Ransom was beside Lee too when they rode up about noon on the second day to see Longstreet’s charge along the Plank Road. The enemy’s line was being rolled back, it looked like another Chancellorsville. A Confederate flanking movement had apparently succeeded, and new columns were moving in at a right angle. Down logs blocked the artillery, and Lee paused to see the way cleared for the guns. The wild ardent yell of the Rebel charge had begun up ahead of them, fragrant smoke from a burning thicket on their right mingled with the dark acrid smoke of the cannon, shutting out the sun, creating a murky twilight among the trees which crowded the narrow road. Longstreet was somewhere up ahead, and there was a smell of victory in the air. Meade was crumpling, Grant’s heavy sacrifice of men the first day was all for nothing, one more push from Longstreet’s well-trained veterans….

There was a scatter of small-arms fire up ahead, a frantic voice shouted,

“Friends! Friends, you fools! ” And then came other voices calling for surgeons, for stretchers, for an ambulance—and for General Lee. It was, in a way, another Chancellorsville. The converging Confederate columns had fired into each other. Longstreet was wounded by his own men, and a general at his side had been killed.

Lee was there to steady them, and Longstreet’s second ranking officer took over, but the columns were muddled. Before the new line of battle could be drawn the advantage was lost, and the Federals could not be budged.

Sedgwick, as one of Stuart’s aides, had seen a hard dismounted action fought with Sheridan’s cavalry, also on foot, on the first day, and nothing much the second, owing to sudden caution on the other side. On the evening of the third day they reconnoitred and saw Yankee wagon-trains worming eastward. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Stuart told them grimly. “He’s trying to turn our right, is he, and get into Spotsylvania! Wait till we tell Marse Robert that!”

So they posted back and told Marse Robert, and the two armies raced for Spotsylvania, and the grey men got there first, and again Stuart’s horse soldiers joined the infantry in hot fighting.

About dark on the ninth the pickets brought word of Sheridan moving south by the Telegraph Road, formed up in fours and riding easy, arrogant as fate in his superior numbers, heading straight for Richmond. Stuart knew the roads, which all led to Richmond thereabouts. He cut corners, fighting little rearguard and flanking actions all the way and threw himself between, and they waited for Sheridan at Yellow Tavern, six miles above Richmond.

Stuart sent word into the city that he was there, across the road. Richmond took heart, and its old men and boys, and the clerks from the Government offices, went into the entrenchments to hold them till a couple of brigades could come up from Petersburg. Petersburg couldn’t spare much, because Butler’s Yankees were moving up from the Peninsula now. Richmond lay between two armies, both of them on the march.

That night Stuart and his aides slept under the stars. He had three thousand and two hundred men, hungry, jaded, worn with a week’s steady fighting, but ready and willing to fight some more. He knew that if Sheridan had brought his full force with him, which was likely, it would be around twelve thousand.

Sheridan attacked next morning, charge after charge, and they held him.

It wasn’t until Custer came up with his mounted Michigan regiments, coolly left all cover, took his losses, and got across the Telegraph Road that the Confederate left began to roll back.

Stuart with Sedgwick and another young officer at heel rode straight for the trouble. They left the rest behind, but their own horses were fresh and the aides managed to hold him in sight. The Telegraph Road was thick with smoke and dust, and Custer’s troopers were sabring the grey men on foot around the horse-batteries, where Fauquier and Grafton Crabb would be.

Stuart galloped up, gigantic on his tall horse. “Steady, boys—form up behind me—off the road, and let them go by—off the road, boys, form up and face the road—our mounted men will stop them farther on— let them go, I say! —form up, and fire into their flank—!”

Custer’s Michiganders went through them in the dust, taking the flanking fire from the roadside as they passed, and met the First Virginia, mounted, head on a little way down the road. The shock of the collision

echoed, merged into a screaming, hacking, blazing tangle of men and horses, fighting hand to hand with sabres and pistols, until Custer’s men broke, many of them unhorsed in combat, broke and turned back along the road they had come.

Stuart was still there with his remnants, sitting his tall horse right in the firing line, letting off his pistol into the Yankee rout, and shouting, “Give it to them now! Let them have it, boys, here they come again!” Sedgwick, who had carried a message to Fitz Lee down the line, was just returning to the general’s side when he saw Stuart reel in the saddle and his head fall forward. Captain Dorsey, who was nearer, caught the horse’s bridle and turned it quickly away from the road. A cry went up from Stuart’s men

—“The general! The general!” Stuart’s horse plunged, and Sedgwick made a flying leap from his own saddle. Together he and Dorsey eased the general down, carried him back into the trees off the road.

“Go on—” Stuart gasped as they held him. “Go back—keep them running—tell Fitz Lee—keep them running—”

The Staff began to collect round him. An ambulance and surgeon were sent for, and arrived down the road under withering fire. Stuart protested that they were wasting time, urged them back into the fight which raged only a hundred yards away. Tight-lipped and silent, they lifted him into the ambulance drawn up in the shelter of the trees, undid his yellow silk sash, found a deep body wound. The pain had increased till he was sweating with it, but he ordered them back to the road, all but three of them, for he was certain that Custer would re-form and come in again, and every man was needed.

Sedgwick stood with the others and saw the ambulance rock away down the road, bullets ploughing the dust around the wheels. A wave of Yankee horsemen nearly engulfed it, but it got away towards the side roads, towards Richmond. All about them rose the banshee Rebel battle cry as Stuart’s men passed the word and gathered themselves to avenge him.

Anger seized the Staff, anger above sorrow, so that they all swung into the saddle as with one motion, and rode yelling back to the road, where Custer was coming in again.

They were thrown back, of course, but they had blunted the drive on Richmond, and Sheridan knew he was not strong enough to hold the city even if he could have taken its northern fortifications. He turned eastward

that night, in a pouring rain, towards the Chickahominy, and they had to let him go.

IV

The firing at Yellow Tavern was clearly heard in the streets of Richmond, but the sound of guns was not new to the household of women and wounded in Franklin Street. Louise and Sally had heard them first at Bristoe, Eden at Williamsburg, and Charlotte was a veteran of the Seven Days’ battle at Richmond’s door two years ago.

At first there was no telling what it meant, though it seemed Grant’s whole army might be behind it, forcing Lee back step by step on the northern defences of the city. There was no panic now when Richmond heard gunfire; the timid ones had all left long ago, and those that were left gathered in knots around the War Department and the telegraph offices and in doorways, waiting, listening, questioning, with anxious faces. The tocsin in Capitol Square rang and rang, calling the militia and the battalions of clerks and invalids to arms.

On the same day that Grant had moved into the Wilderness, Butler had embarked his army from Fortress Monroe and come up the James—“Beast”

Butler, infamous for his reign of terror in New Orleans in 1862. If Butler’s troops took Richmond, women would be afraid to go into the streets alone.

He landed without opposition at City Point below the capital and began intrenching. This put him within easy reach of the Confederate fortifications at Drewry’s Bluff on one side and the Petersburg railway on the other.

Harvey Hill and Beauregard were at Drewry’s Bluff, and Pickett was at Petersburg. So when the guns began south of the city it meant that Lafe or Dabney or both were seeing action. Louise was white and quiet, but otherwise showed no emotion as she went about her duties among the wounded in her care, while Charlotte chattered endless nothings because she was upset about Dabney.

For days the wounded had been pouring into Richmond from the Wilderness fighting to the north, and morphine and chloroform were running short, ether and opium had vanished entirely, and laudanum was available only in such small amounts that it had slight effect on the agony that filled the hospitals. The Crabbs’ little hospital was full, and mattresses

had been laid on the floor of the drawing room ward after the cots had been crowded still closer together to make room for half a dozen more men.

Coming out of the improvised surgical ward which used to be the dining-room, Louise found Eden bent over a basin in the scant privacy of the stair-landing. The whole house reeked of wounds and death. Eden looked up at her piteously, damp and shaking.

“I thought I was getting used to it,” Eden said. “You’d think that with food so scarce I could learn to keep mine down, anyway.”

“It’s their fortitude,” said Louise with a weary, understanding smile, for she had by now stopped losing her breakfast after a session in the surgical ward. “One could bear it better if they’d just let go and groan!”